The Xenophile Historian Newsletter, #21

Greetings once again to all my loyal readers! Charles Kimball is here, to give you the latest news on my world history website. For those who haven’t heard it already, I am back in Kentucky. Overall I consider my job in Danbury, CT to have been a success, but it ended in April, after ten and a half months, when the company ran out of work for me to do. Unfortunately the economy in Kentucky is still dismal; in the six months since I returned, I have not worked a day. Therefore my two main daily activities have been looking for a job, and promoting my LegalShield business. Of course it would help a lot if the current government was serious about fixing the economy; I cannot eat healthcare, green energy, gay marriage, or any other form of “social engineering” that the folks in Washington are preoccupied with. Therefore I have come to the conclusion that I won’t have a job again until President Obama loses his. With the election just days away, hopefully I’ll have better news on that front, the next time I write a newsletter.

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But I’m not writing just to tell you of my troubles; I know you’re more interested in what is new at http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com. As was the case last time, the main event is another chapter in my ongoing history series about Latin America and the Caribbean. Chapter 4 is entitled “Post-Colonial Blues,” and it covers the difficult early years that came immediately after independence, from 1830 to 1889. I uploaded it last week, and divided it into three parts, with the following subheadings:

The Struggle to Build New States
Enter the Caudillo
Central America: Out of One, Many
Mexico: Santa Anna’s Misadventures
Argentina: The Rise and Fall of Rosas
Chile: The Conservative Era
Peru and Bolivia: Disorder on the Borders
Paraguay: El Excelentísimo
Uruguay: Caught in the Crossfire
Mexico: The Incredible Shrinking Country

New Granada
The Reform War
Nicaragua: The Filibuster
Honduras and Costa Rica, Before they Became Banana Republics
Venezuela: The Barracks
Ecuador: The First Generation
The Franco-Mexican War
Argentina Pulls Itself Together
Chile: The Liberal Era
The War of the Triple Alliance
Cuba and Puerto Rico: The Last Spanish Colonies

Haiti and the Dominican Republic: Experiments in Bad Government
Ecuador: The Monastery
A Golden Age Begins for Argentina and Uruguay
Guatemala Takes a Step Back
Mexico: The Porfiriato
The War of the Pacific
Colombia: The University
Império Brasileiro (The Brazilian Empire)
Breaking the Rubber Monopoly

And if you haven’t yet seen Chapters 1-3, you can access them from here:

The other new pages I have created since the last newsletter are meant to promote my LegalShield business. Each of them is on a different website, so one is a hub or launching pad to the rest; it also explains how LegalShield works. This page is in the main folder of The Xenophile Historian (as opposed to being in a subdirectory), the first new page I have added there since 2007:

Everything else I have done since the last newsletter is not so big, just new sections, footnotes, pictures, etc., so I will go through them quickly. I reorganized my North American history to make room for what I write in the future, to keep it up to date. Three sections from the end of Chapter 5 (the USA from 1933 to 2009) were detached for form a sixth chapter, called The USA Today (nothing to do with the newspaper by that name!). The former Chapter 6, my Canadian history paper, is now Chapter 7. Here is a link to that history series:

On the other hand, I decided two of the African history papers were too long, rather than too short, so Chapter 7 was split into two parts, and Chapter 9 was split into three. And for Chapter 7 I added a few paragraphs on Madagascar’s Queen Ranavalona the Cruel:

Chapter 2 in the European history series, my chapter on classical Greece, got the same treatment; it was also split into two smaller pages. And footnote #7, which covers a strange story about the Olympic Games, is new:

There are also some new additions to “The Holy Book of Universal Truths” folder, where I put my not-so-serious opinions and commentaries. Chapter 1 has a new section on those witty sayings called Paraprosdokians:

For Chapter 8, I brought back “A Military History of France,” inasmuch as the French have slipped back into their old habits, and elected a socialist president who is less friendly to us than his predecessor:

And finally, a new era has begun for the website. For the first time since 2001, I renegotiated the terms of my contract with the host, Freeservers.com. This increases the space available for the site, from 200 megs to a whopping 5 gigs. No, I haven’t yet decided what I’ll put in that space, and I know I won’t need it if I stick to the mostly text format the site has now. But those who surf the Web demand more and more multi-media all the time, so if I decide to add videos and music, I’ll have room for it!

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So what else am I planning? Currently it looks like it will take two more chapters, to do a decent job of covering the remaining 123 years of Latin American history, from 1889 to the present. And the book I am reading right now has me re-thinking the connection between the Tower of Babel and the Sumerian civilization; if I accept those theories, it means rewriting at least three history papers, in the Genesis and Near East folders. On top of all that, there are updates needed for the subjects I have already covered; some of the oldest papers on the site were first composed in the late 80s/early 90s, long before I got Internet access. Therefore I expect to keep on writing for the rest of my active life, even after I complete the goal of uploading history papers about practically everybody.

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That’s the latest website-related news. If you missed older issues of the newsletter and want to see them, they can be downloaded in a zip file fromhttp://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/download/index.html . And the links below go to topics I mentioned in previous issues, that are still valid. Please visit them, if you haven’t already:

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